Pete Hegseth’s Secret History
A
whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run
the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial
mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.
By Jane Mayer
December
1, 2024
After the recent revelation that Pete Hegseth
had secretly paid a financial settlement to a woman who had accused him of
raping her in 2017, President-elect Donald Trump stood by his choice of Hegseth
to become the next Secretary of Defense. Trump’s communications director, Steven
Cheung, issued a statement noting that Hegseth, who has denied
wrongdoing, has not been charged with any crime. “President Trump is nominating
high-caliber and extremely qualified candidates to serve in his
administration,” Cheung maintained.
But Hegseth’s record before becoming a
full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his
suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail
of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that
Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups
that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face
of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal
misconduct.
A previously undisclosed
whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned
Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly
intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be
carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which
was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s
senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to
be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana
strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth,
who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually
pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two
groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report
asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile
workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation
made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had
attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate
letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a
different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning
hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio,
drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”
In response to questions from this
magazine, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, replied with the following
statement, which he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth: “We’re not going to
comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by
a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to
us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism.”
Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat
from Connecticut and a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described
the report of Hegseth’s drinking as alarming and disqualifying. In a phone
interview, Blumenthal, who currently leads the Senate committee that will
review Hegseth’s nomination, told me, “Much as we might be sympathetic to
people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our
national-security structure.” Blumenthal went on, “It’s dangerous. The
Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s
involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending
troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian
casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary
of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be
incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”
Blumenthal noted that an earlier
nominee for Secretary of Defense, Senator John Tower, a Republican from Texas,
was voted down by his Senate colleagues in 1989 because of concerns about his
drinking and womanizing. It was the first time that the Cabinet pick of a newly
elected President, in this case George H. W. Bush, was rejected by the Senate.
“John Tower went down for these same kinds of issues,” Blumenthal said. “I
don’t think it’s a partisan issue.”
In January, 2016, Hegseth resigned
from Concerned Veterans for America, under pressure. An account in the Military
Times said that Hegseth had “quietly resigned,” in a decision that was
“mutual” with the organization, amid “rumors of a rift between the former
C.E.O. and the group’s financial backers.” Hegseth, who had no other job lined
up at the time, gave no explanation for his departure, other than saying,
“Sometimes it just makes sense to make a transition.” C.V.A., for its part,
released a statement saying that it thanked Hegseth “for his many
contributions” and wished him well. But, according to three knowledgeable
sources, one of whom contributed to the whistle-blower report, Hegseth was
forced to step down from the organization in part because of concerns about his
mismanagement and abuse of alcohol on the job.
“Congratulations on Removing Pete
Hegseth” is the subject line of an e-mail, obtained by The New Yorker,
that was sent to Hegseth’s successor as president of the group, Jae Pak, on
January 15, 2016. The e-mail, sent under a pseudonym by one of the
whistle-blowers, included a copy of the report, and went on to say, “Among the
staff, the disgust for Pete was pretty high. Most veterans do not think he
represents them nor their high standard of excellence.” The e-mail also stated
that Hegseth had “a history of alcohol abuse” and had “treated the organization
funds like they were a personal expense account—for partying, drinking, and
using CVA events as little more than opportunities to ‘hook up’ with women on
the road.”
Pak, who had served as C.V.A.’s chief
operating officer before taking over its presidency, and who no longer works
there, declined to comment. A spokesman at Americans for Prosperity, the
umbrella political group run by the far-right billionaire Koch
family—under whose auspices Concerned Veterans for America was
launched, in 2011—confirmed that Hegseth had resigned but declined to comment
further on personnel matters. Breitbart News, a publication that acts as a
publicist for Trump, attempted to discredit this article before it was
published by claiming that it would be citing a “screed” about Hegseth written
by a “jealous former coworker” who had been “fired.” In fact, the report
disclosed in this article is not the same document, although there are some overlaps.
(Nearly a dozen employees were laid off by C.V.A. during the time Hegseth
worked there, and the proliferation of critical memos and letters to the
group’s management speaks to the high level of discontent within the
organization.)
The whistle-blower report makes
extensive allegations. It describes several top managers being involved in
drunken episodes, including an altercation at a casino and a hotel Christmas
party at which food was thrown from the balcony. Hegseth, it says, was “seen
drunk at multiple CVA events” between 2013 and 2015, a time when the
organization was engaged in an ambitious nationwide effort to mobilize veterans
to vote for conservative candidates and causes. The project gave Hegseth and
his team the opportunity to travel far from the organization’s headquarters, in
northern Virginia. Hegseth and his team gave speeches, assisted conservative
campaigns, and collected voter data valuable for the Kochs’ political
operation. As a decorated veteran who by 2014 had become an on-air contributor
to Fox News, Hegseth was the public face of the group’s mission, conducting a
whistle-stop tour with his team from city to city, packaged by C.V.A. as the
Defend Freedom Tour.
I spoke at length with two people who
identified themselves as having contributed to the whistle-blower report. One
of them said of Hegseth, “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him
dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him
at the Pentagon would be scary,” adding, “When those of us who worked at C.V.A.
heard he was being considered for SecDef, it wasn’t ‘No,’ it was ‘Hell
No!’ ” According to the complaint, at one such C.V.A. event in Virginia Beach,
on Memorial Day weekend in 2014, Hegseth was “totally sloshed” and needed to be
carried to his room because “he was so intoxicated.” The following month,
during an event in Cleveland, Hegseth, who had gone with his team to a bar
around the corner from their hotel, was described as “completely drunk in a
public place.” According to the report, “several high profile people” who
attended the organization’s event “were very disappointed to see this kind of
public behavior,” though the report does not identify them.
In October, 2014, C.V.A. instituted a
“no alcohol” policy at its events. But the next month, according to the report,
Hegseth and another manager lifted the policy while overseeing a
get-out-the-vote field operation to boost Republican candidates in North
Carolina. According to the report, on the evening before the election, Hegseth,
who had been out with three young female staff members, was so inebriated by
1 a.m. that a staffer who had
driven him to his hotel, in a van full of other drunken staffers, asked for
assistance to get Hegseth to his room. “Pete was completely passed out in the
middle seat, slumped over” a young female staff member, the report says. It
took two male staff members to get Hegseth into the hotel; after one young
woman vomited in some bushes, another helped him into bed. In the morning, a
team member had to wake Hegseth so that he didn’t miss his flight. “All of this
happened in public,” according to the report, while C.V.A. was “embedded” in
the Republican get-out-the-vote effort. It went on, “Everyone who saw this was
disgusted and in shock that the head of the team was that intoxicated.”
According to the report, a volunteer for the organization
during this period was so concerned about the rampant promiscuity and sexism
that she sent an e-mail to C.V.A.’s headquarters complaining about a lack of
professionalism, an unhealthy workplace, and an atmosphere in which women were
unfairly treated. According to the whistle-blower with whom I spoke, the
volunteer received no response. The New Yorker was unable to
reach the volunteer, but a source unconnected to C.V.A. confirmed that the
volunteer had also spoken to him about having sent an e-mail to the group’s top
management because she had been upset by Hegseth’s frequent drunkenness.
In late November, 2014, Hegseth and
his team deployed to Louisiana for a U.S. Senate runoff. This is when,
according to the whistle-blower complaint, Hegseth took the C.V.A. team to the
strip club, where “he was so drunk he tried to get on the stage and dance with
the strippers.” A female C.V.A. associate, the report says, “had to get him off
of the stage,” adding, “She had to intervene with security to prevent him from
getting thrown out.” The whistle-blower continued, as if in disbelief, “A Fox
News contributor, with the rank of captain (at the time) in the National Guard,
and the CEO of a veterans’ organization . . . was in a strip
club trying to dance with strippers.”
Meanwhile, the female staffer who had
to restrain Hegseth at the strip club alleged that a different male staff
member had attempted to sexually assault her there, according to the report. A
C.V.A. manager, however, was described as dismissive, for arguing that her
attacker had been drunk and therefore shouldn’t be held responsible. According
to the report, the female staffer took steps to file a complaint with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, and C.V.A. hired outside counsel. The female
staffer declined to be interviewed. But, according to a source aware of the
case, the matter was settled with a payment to the staffer, concealed by a
nondisclosure agreement. As a result, the woman was “ostracized” and
“experiencing reprisal” by the organization, which, the whistle-blower report
said, “has become a hostile and intimidating working environment.” Another
female staff member was also described as having been sexually harassed by a
colleague, but was too intimidated to come forward “because she desperately
needs her job.” The report declared, in bold print, “Fear of reprisal looms
over every woman associated with the organization.”
In December, 2014, the group held an
office Christmas party at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. Once again, according
to the report, Hegseth was “noticeably intoxicated and had to be carried up to
his room.” The report stated, “His behavior was embarrassing in front of the
team, but not surprising; people have simply come to expect Pete to get drunk
at social events.”
The 2015 federal tax filing by C.V.A.
has an unusual note saying that “major programs developed in the last fiscal
year were paused,” and it describes Hegseth as
“President (outgoing).” By the start of 2016, Hegseth, who had been paid a
salary of $177,460, was out of his job.
A separate letter obtained by The
New Yorker, which was e-mailed by a different staffer on November, 2015, to
Pak, Hegseth’s successor, expresses the upset that Hegseth’s behavior caused.
“The organization is owed the truth,” the staffer wrote before he described two
incidents that, he said, “change my perception of Mr. Pete Hegseth,” especially
“as the face of C.V.A.” He went on to recount what took place in Cuyahoga
Falls, Ohio. On May 29, 2015, the staffer said, Hegseth and someone travelling
with the group’s Defend Freedom Tour closed down the bar at the Sheraton Suites
Hotel. The duo yelled “Kill All Muslims” multiple times, in what the staffer
described as “a drunk and a violent manner.” Hegseth’s “despicable behavior,”
he wrote, “embarrassed the entire organization.” He went on, “I personally was
ashamed and . . . others were as well.” The staffer’s letter
cited a second incident in which, he wrote, Hegseth “passed out” in the back of
a party bus, then urinated in front of a hotel where C.V.A.’s team was staying.
“I tell you this because it’s the truth,” the letter concluded. “And I
sincerely care about the mission of C.VA and the future of my kids and the
country.”
Reached for comment, the author of the
letter said, “If you print that, I will deny I wrote it.” When he was reminded
that it had been sent from the same personal e-mail account that he still uses,
he said, “I don’t care. I’ll just say it never happened.”
Hegseth has been open about resorting
to alcohol during a period in his life when he had returned to the U.S. from
active military duty and felt lost. In a 2022 interview with the Reserve
& National Guard Magazine, he said that, after coming
home, he felt isolated and unmoored.
Raised in Minnesota, Hegseth signed up
for the Army R.O.T.C. in 2001 while attending Princeton, where he majored in
politics and published the Princeton Tory, a pugnacious
conservative journal that lambasted liberalism on campus. He published a
commentary by another student mocking the view, expressed during the school’s
orientation program, that sex with an unconscious partner constituted rape. As
first reported online by the newsletter “Popular Information,” run
by Judd Legum, the commentary claimed that rape required both a failure to
consent and “duress,” which a passed-out woman couldn’t experience.
After graduating, in 2003, Hegseth
worked briefly on Wall Street, as an equity-markets analyst at Bear Stearns. In
2004, he was deployed for a year to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he oversaw a
platoon of soldiers from New Jersey guarding detainees. Soon after returning,
and still with the National Guard, he volunteered to serve in Iraq, for which
the Army awarded him the first of two Bronze Stars for meritorious service.
Afterward, he moved to New York, a transition that he has acknowledged was
“jarring.” He told Reserve & National Guard Magazine, “I went
from being in a combat zone to being in an apartment in Manhattan and without
any contact other than phone calls here or an email here or there with the guys
who I had served with.” He said, “I didn’t do much and I drank a lot trying to
process what I had been through while dealing with a civilian world that
frankly just didn’t seem to care.”
Advocating for veterans gave him a renewed sense of
purpose, he said. In New York, he met a marine who was working for a small
nonprofit organization called Vets for Freedom, which advocated for expanding
the war in Iraq. In an interview, one early conservative sympathizer with the
group described it to me as essentially an “AstroTurf” organization that had
been devised by a handful of big-time political players to look like it was a
grassroots veterans’ movement. Hegseth once told a former associate that V.F.F.’s
donors included three Republican billionaires who have since passed away:
Bernard Marcus, the Home Depot magnate; Jerry Perenchio, the former head of
Univision; and Harold Simmons, a Texas entrepreneur.
Hegseth appealed to the backers, the
early sympathizer told me: he was a handsome, articulate Princeton graduate who
had served honorably in the military, and, at the time, he believed ardently in
the surge in America’s war in Iraq. By 2007, Hegseth had become the
organization’s leader. “I had no idea what I was doing,” he told the National
Guard publication. “I didn’t know if it would work.”
In fact, under his leadership, V.F.F.
soon ran up enormous debt, and financial records indicate that, by the end of
2008, it was unable to pay its creditors. The group’s primary donors became
concerned that their money was being wasted on inappropriate expenses; there
were rumors of parties that “could politely be called trysts,” as the former
associate of the group put it. The early sympathizer said, “I was not the first
to hear that there was money sloshing around and sexually inappropriate
behavior in the workplace.”
In 2004, Hegseth had married his first
of three wives, his high-school girlfriend from Minnesota, Meredith Schwarz.
But he often lived apart from her while working in Washington, staying at a
pool house owned by the parents of one of her college friends. In 2008, Schwarz
filed for divorce after Hegseth admitted to multiple infidelities—his wife
later learned that a journalist he’d introduced her to was among those with
whom he was having an affair. The couple divorced in 2009.
Meanwhile, the finances of V.F.F. grew
so dire that the group’s donors hatched a plan to take control away from
Hegseth. The donors’ representatives hired a forensic accountant to review the
books. The findings were appalling. In January, 2009, Hegseth sent a letter to
the donors admitting that, as of that day, the group had less than a thousand
dollars in the bank and $434,833 in unpaid bills. The group also had run up
credit-card debts of as much as seventy-five thousand dollars. Hegseth said
that he took full responsibility for the mess, but added that, unless the
donors gave him more funds, V.F.F. would have to file for bankruptcy and close
down.
One of the group’s backers initially
agreed to Hegseth’s request. But, according to the early sympathizer, the
donors decided, “Let’s shut this thing down. Pete can get another job.” The
donors, who were strong supporters of America’s military role in Iraq and
Afghanistan, arranged for another veterans’ group, Military Families United,
which represented Gold Star families, to merge with V.F.F. and take over most
of its management. “We tried to castrate him,” Hegseth’s former associate
admitted. “It was a handoff.” Annual federal tax filings for V.F.F. show the
group’s coffers draining and Hegseth’s compensation dwindling. In 2010, the
records show, Hegseth was identified as the group’s “Executive
Director/President” and was paid forty-five thousand dollars for thirty hours
of work a week. The next year, he was identified as the group’s “officer,” and
paid a salary of five thousand dollars for thirty minutes of work a week. In
2012, the tax filing again identified him as the group’s “officer,” and his
compensation rose to eight thousand dollars, but the total grants received by
the group that year totalled a mere eighty-one dollars.
Margaret Hoover, a Republican
political commentator and political strategist who worked as an adviser to
V.F.F. between 2008 and 2010, recently told CNN that she had grave concerns
about Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon, the largest department in the
federal government, given his mismanagement at V.F.F. “I watched him run an
organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization
ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who
individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more
responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.” Hoover stressed
that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten
employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She
told CNN, “And he couldn’t do that properly—I don’t know how he’s going to run
an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and
three million individuals.”
By 2012, Hegseth had departed from
what remained of V.F.F., and had launched an abortive bid for the Senate from
Minnesota, where he was a captain in the state’s National Guard. He then
volunteered for another tour of active duty, this time in Afghanistan, to train
Afghan security forces. Upon completing his tour of duty, he was promoted to
the rank of major. In 2012, Hegseth formed a political-action committee,
MN PAC, to help like-minded
candidates, but, according to a report by American Public Media, a third of the
funds in Hegseth’s PAC was
spent on parties for his family and friends, and less than half was spent on
candidates.
In 2014, Hegseth joined Fox News, as a
contributor. By then, he also was the C.E.O. of the Kochs’ Concerned Veterans
for America group. But by 2016 Hegseth had been forced to step aside from the
organization. “There’s a long pattern, over more than a decade, of malfeasance,
financial mismanagement, and sexual impropriety,” Hegseth’s former associate
told me. “There’s a fair dose of bullying and misinformation, too.”
It was as a celebrated veteran and
weekend Fox News contributor that Hegseth appeared in October, 2017, as a
dinner speaker at the California Federation of Republican Women’s fortieth
biennial convention, in Monterey, California. His personal life was in tumult.
In 2010, he had married a second time, to Samantha Deering, a co-worker at Vets
for Freedom. He admitted in an essay that year that he had fathered a child
“out of wedlock” before marrying her, the Times reported.
Then, in August, 2017, while still married to Deering, he fathered a daughter
with another woman, a producer at Fox, Jennifer Rauchet, whom he eventually
married, in 2019. As he and Deering wrangled their way through a difficult
divorce, as the Times first reported, his
mother, Penelope Hegseth, sent him an e-mail excoriating him as “an abuser of
women” who “belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own
power and ego.” She admonished him, “Get some help and take an honest look at
yourself.” (A Trump spokesman denounced the newspaper’s publication of the
e-mail as “despicable” and noted that Hegseth’s mother had apologized to him
for writing it.)
A former colleague of Hegseth’s at Fox
recalled of him, “He had a kind of what-happens-in-Vegas-stays-in-Vegas kind of
attitude, while his wife and kids were in Minnesota.” The colleague added, “He
was a huge drinker. I can’t say if he had a problem, but he was very handsy
with women, too. I’ve certainly seen him drunk.”
Following his dinner speech at the
convention, according to a report released by the
Monterey Police Department, Hegseth and other attendees moved to an
after-party, and then on to a sports bar in the hotel. There, the woman who
would become Hegseth’s alleged sexual-assault victim—a then thirty-year-old
organizer working with the Republican Women’s group—tried to intervene when she
thought that Hegseth had become pushy toward a female attendee at the
conference. He had allegedly touched the other woman’s legs and tried to get
her to come to his hotel room, the police report recounts. The female attendee
told police investigators that she had sent distress signals to “Jane Doe”—as
the alleged victim is called in the police report—in hopes of getting her to
act as what she called a “crotch blocker.” One onlooker told police that she
thought both women had been flirting with Hegseth. But a friend of the woman
who had signalled for Jane Doe’s assistance confirmed her account, saying that
her friend had told her that Hegseth’s advances had been unwanted.
A bit later, around 1 A.M.,
the hotel’s video-surveillance footage captured Jane Doe escorting Hegseth away
from the bar, walking arm in arm. Soon afterward, according to a hotel
employee’s statement to the police, the two engaged in a loud argument by the
pool. The employee said that two separate guests had called to report the
disturbance, and described Hegseth as “very intoxicated,” saying that he cursed
at the employee when he approached them. Hegseth argued that he had freedom of
speech. The alleged victim, who told police that she had drunk more than usual
that day, but who had appeared “not intoxicated” to the hotel employee,
apologized for Hegseth’s behavior to the employee, and told him that they were
both Republicans. She then guided Hegseth toward his hotel room. Later, she
told the police that they’d been arguing over what she regarded as Hegseth’s
inappropriate treatment of women.
What happened next is disputed. Text
messages from the alleged victim to her husband—who had accompanied her to the
conference and was staying at the hotel, along with their two young
children—suggest that she was less than enamored of Hegseth. According to the
police report, she texted that he was “giving off a ‘creeper’ vibe” and made
fun of the ladies who, she said, were “freaking drooling over him.” She
lamented at one point, “I’m going to be here all night,” adding, “It’s awful.”
Her husband, meanwhile, asked if he should make s’mores with the kids or go
ahead and “continue winding them down.”
Hours later, the alleged victim’s
husband was still waiting for her return. Worried, he’d searched the sports
bar, but it was empty. Around 2 A.M.,
he texted her, saying, “Holy smokes lady . . . I don’t remember
the last time you were socializing at nearly 2:00 am.” She responded oddly,
typing, “Hahaha I know. I gotta make sure that fo”—dropping off mid-sentence.
He responded, “Doing ok? My love? Worried about you.”
A few hours before dawn, the alleged
victim returned to the hotel room that she was sharing with her husband and
kids. She told police later that she couldn’t recall much of what had happened.
But two days later she started to have frightening flashbacks and nightmares.
She told police that she hazily recalled Hegseth taking her phone and blocking
the door as she tried to leave. She recalled him on top of her, with his dog
tags in her face. She recalled saying no a lot. Four days after the alleged
assault, she went to a hospital and asked for a rape exam. She said that she
thought someone might have slipped a drug into her drink and sexually assaulted
her. She brought in the clothes she’d worn that night. According to the police
report, she had developed an infection that could have resulted from a new
sexual partner. She declined to name her alleged assailant. The nurse was
legally required to report the incident to the police, who opened a criminal
investigation. At that point, the alleged victim identified her assaulter as
Hegseth.
Hegseth’s account was quite different.
He told police that he had not been intoxicated but just “buzzed.” He had no
memory of being belligerent or of being chastised about making noise by the
pool, nor of having any sexual interest in his accuser. He said that he was
confused when she stayed in his hotel room for what he said had “progressed”
into a consensual sexual encounter.
The Monterey Country District
Attorney’s office brought no charges against Hegseth, explaining that “no
charges were supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” The alleged victim
and her husband threatened to file a lawsuit, and in 2020 Hegseth secretly
agreed to a financial settlement with them, in which he agreed to pay them an
undisclosed sum. Both sides agreed to sign nondisclosure agreements concealing
everything about the incident.
According to the Wall Street
Journal, Trump’s transition team was blindsided by the
sexual-assault story because Hegseth had failed to disclose anything about it,
including the fact that he had paid off his accuser. He also failed to disclose
that he had received a copy of the police report in 2021, long before the
Monterey police’s recent release of it. The series of damning revelations has
reportedly infuriated the transition team. “When we ask, ‘Is there anything
else we need to know about?’ that is usually a good time to mention a police
report,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone.
“Obviously he remembered that this all happened and there is no way—I don’t
think—he could have believed this wouldn’t come out once he got nominated.”
In 2016, Justin Higgins, a former
Republican opposition researcher, vetted Hegseth for under-secretary roles in
the first Trump Administration, on behalf of the Republican National Committee.
In a commentary for MSNBC, Higgins
wrote that, although he believes that Hegseth is “perhaps one of the least
qualified picks for Secretary of Defense that we’ve seen,” he thinks that
Hegseth “was likely chosen because he seems willing to say and do anything
Trump wants.” It hadn’t hurt, Higgins added, that Hegseth belittled
some war crimes, and that “Trump thinks he looks and
sounds good on TV.” Hegseth has also been a strident opponent of gender
equality in the military, proclaiming women unfit for combat, and calling the
claim that diversity is a strength “garbage.” In 2021, he was barred from
participating in President Biden’s Inauguration because a military officer was
alarmed that Hegseth had tattoos of a Crusader’s cross and the motto “Deus
Vult”—insignias popular with far-right militants—and had alerted superiors that
Hegseth might constitute an “insider threat.”
On November 21st, Hegseth was cornered by reporters at the
U.S. Capitol, as he called on senators whose votes he would need for his
confirmation, accompanied by Vice-President-elect J. D.
Vance. When Hegseth was asked about the sexual-assault
allegation, he insisted that he had been exonerated of any wrongdoing. “The
matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared and that’s where I
am going to leave it,” he told reporters.
In an interview, Tim Parlatore,
Hegseth’s lawyer, told me that his client was completely innocent, and that his
accuser “was the aggressor” and had “tried to blackmail him.” He also claimed
that “sources,” whom he declined to identify, told him there was a shocking
reason law-enforcement authorities hadn’t charged Hegseth: their investigation
had discovered that his accuser had previously brought a false rape charge
against someone else, thus undermining her credibility. Parlatore made the same
allegation in the New York Post, which quoted Hegseth demanding
that Monterey County law-enforcement officials release their investigative
records on the accuser.
The defense’s claim that the accuser
was a serial fabricator of sexual-assault charges is reminiscent of the bind
that Anita
Hill faced decades ago, during Justice Clarence Thomas’s
confirmation process. Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her when he had
been her boss at the E.E.O.C. Thomas denied Hill’s accusation, and his
defenders attacked her credibility by spreading false rumors that she was an
“erotomaniac” and a chronic liar. None of it was true. But it took time to
disprove the falsehoods. Meanwhile, her credibility was damaged, and Thomas was
confirmed.
A few days ago, I filed a
public-records request with the Monterey County District Attorney’s office,
asking for any information supporting the claim made by Hegseth’s lawyer that
his accuser had levied sexual-assault claims against others. The answer came
back promptly and definitively. The claim is spurious. The office had no such
evidence. ♦
